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So someone nominated us for the “Small Business Influencer Awards” on SmallBizTrends.com. Whoever did that… we want to say “thank you”! We are very honored as some great companies have been nominated/won in the past. Last year companies like Hubspot, HootSuite, Paychex and Constant Contact were nominated and won. Unfortunately we just found out about our nomination over the weekend so we are playing catchup. We missed a full week of votes.

Anyway, we need your help. Can you click on the badge to your left or the link below to vote for us?

“According to a 2011 study, on a typical day, we(Americans) take in the equivalent of about 174 newspapers’ worth of information, five times as much as we did in 1986.” Source: New York Times

That statistic makes me tired just looking at it. The real downside of the content marketing explosion is all of the noise. It can be a real time sink. For example, look at this post – “50 Marketing Blogs You Should Read Every Day” – What?

To combat the info overload it is important for you to narrow down your reading to only the best content. The people & blogs you follow should not only be well-informed, but they should also be thoughtful posters. People that tweet too much or have too many self-serving posts can be a real time sink. Here is a list of Sales & Marketing pros that provide quality content that is not exhausting.

Rand FishkinCEO @ Moz@randfishhttp://moz.com/rand/
If you haven’t heard of this guy you must be new to marketing. I saw him speak for the first time at SMX in 2008 I think. Articulate, well-read and understands the value of quality over quantity. I pretty much read anything the guy writes or posts.

Ken KrogueCEO @ InsideSales@KenKrogue
Ken is a great guy to follow. His sales-focused SaaS company is exploding. He seems to post about 2 times a day and they are usually interesting. Topics include Sales, Marketing and Entrepreneurship.

KissMetrics Blog@KissMetrics
I follow @neilpatel and @hitenshah as well as @kissmetrics, but I pay more attention to the KissMetrics tweets as everything they produce is more relevant to me. I mostly like their conversion and SEO content. Lead411 is also a customer of theirs. It has been great tool for us.

Sales4Startupshttp://sales4startups.org
This is a great resource to find out more about other sales startups and tools. I recommend just signing up for their newsletter to get their new posts over using their twitter feed.

Danny Brown Author/Blogger@DannyBrownDannyBrown.me
I just came across Danny recently and really enjoy him… Everything is well thought out and focused. This is probably the highest quality content you will read. I wouldn’t just follow him on Twitter though – I would also signup for his RSS feed so you don’t miss any of his posts – dannybrown.me

Jill KonrathSales Author@jillkonrathhttp://www.jillkonrath.com
I follow Jill as she is probably the most social Sales personality out there. I haven’t read any of her books, but she is a good person to follow to know what is happening in the sales world.

Unbounce Bloghttp://unbounce.com/blog/
I don’t follow @unbounce on twitter. I just subscribe to their blog. Their posts focus on their niche which is conversion optimization and a/b testing.

Kendra LeeCEO @ KLA Group@kendraleeKLA
Not as well known as Jill Konrath and Jeffrey Gitomer, but she produces some excellent sales and lead generation content. She is probably less well known because she is busy running her lead generation firm KLA Group.

MarketingProfs@marketingprofs
I love statistics. While reading a specific story on how a company was able to grow their business is interesting to me, knowing what works for a lot of businesses is even better. I use MarketingProfs to see which tactics are working and which ones aren’t.

Are you looking to buy a b2b email list for sales & marketing, but want to make sure you receive high quality data? When I first founded Lead411 I could count on my hand which companies sold b2b email lists. Not opt-in lists, but actually had lists for sale. Now, on average I get 5-10 emails a month from some broker stating they sell business email lists. I would say that 95-100% of these offers are scams… but recently I have noticed some of these providers in the top 10 in Google for the phrase “b2b email lists”. Which is scary! This guide will give you some best practices on what to be wary of when purchasing and will give you a list of some reputable providers.

Best Practices for Buying Email Lists

Quality Email Lists Are Not Cheap

I have been in this business for over 10 years. Data is never perfect. Good data is extremely HARD to keep accurate and clean. For example, Linkedin is a high quality data provider correct? You would be amazed at how many people named “Pat McGroin” and “Ivanka Tinkle” have profiles on Linkedin. So even Linkedin has tons of bad data. It is incredibly hard and expensive to keep data clean. Any email list provider that works really hard to keep their data clean isn’t going to give it away for pennies.

Get A Random Sample w/your List Quote

When you get your list quote, insist that you get a random sample… as big as you can get. Most companies or their sales staff will try to send you the records they most recently updated. You want a complete random sample so that you can really check the accuracy.

Verify Your Sample List Quality

After you get the sample, test it all. Call the phone numbers to see if the person does exist at the company and that the phone # is correct. Email testing is harder because you cannot 100% verify an email address. From our own email marketing and testing we have noticed that 50% of business email servers are catchall servers meaning that if you sent an email like gozzsd.asdof@microsoft.com you would NOT get a bounce-back. For these catchall servers it is hard to decipher the accurate email. You can use tools like Mailtester.com or Cobisi.com to verify emails from non-catchall servers, but for the rest I would suggest searching bing or google for the domain to see if the email pattern looks remotely correct. E.G. Type this into bing +*@insidesales.com.

Insist on a Guarantee

Whenever we sell individual lists we always offer a guarantee. So if an email bounces then the person gets a replacement record. It is a great system because we get our emails tested automatically. Any email list provider that does not do this doesn’t really care about their data accuracy.

How do they Verify their Email Database?

Where do they get their data from? More importantly, where do they get their emails from? Crowdsourcing, some sort of technology, both? Other data providers?

Some Reputable B2B Email List Providers

Hoovers/D&B
Pricing: N/A
D&B has been around since 1841. 160+ years before “big data” became a popular term D&B was collecting information about businesses. In 2003, Hoovers was acquired by D&B and somewhere around that time Hoovers started offering business email database with their company contacts. I am not quite sure of the pricing of their email lists as there is nothing on the site that mentions their exact costs. Hoovers acquires their data from numerous data sources as we have discussed selling our data to DNB in the past, however we never went through with it.

ZoomInfo
Pricing: Subscriptions start @ $60/month
ZoomInfo is another well-known provider of business email lists and addresses. Previously named Eliyon Technologies, the company has been collecting business and people data for over 15 years using scraping/crawling technology. I am not positive where their email address data comes from as I don’t believe it is from their crawlers, but for the most part it is a reputable source. ZoomInfo offers numerous products but their primary solution is their subscriptions.

Data.com
Pricing: Subscriptions start @ $125/Month
Email Lists @ $0.50 – $1.00 per record
Jigsaw.com was acquired by Salesforce and later they changed the name to Data.com. Data.com uses crowdsourcing to collect contacts, business email addresses, phone numbers, etc. If you are willing to upload your own list you can get another list in return. Data.com sells email lists as well as offers a monthly subscription.

InsideView
Pricing: Subscriptions start @ $99/Month
I have never used InsideView’s data, but from what I can tell it seems better than others I have seen. Like us, they don’t believe that data can be verified using one type of solution. InsideView does not sell individual lists but they have different options for the size of company you are.

Lead411
Pricing: Subscriptions start @ $39/Month
Unlimited List Downloads @ $166/Month
Email Lists @ $0.50 per record
Our customers don’t have time to waste on bad data and they want access to Unlimited Email Lists. We strongly believe that a multi-pronged approach to data collection is the best way to get accurate data…. Crowdsourcing + Technology + An Internal Research Team. Here is a recent research report from G2Crowd where we were named one of the “Top Performers.”

If you have any suggestions or recommendations of other b2b email list providers please use the comments section below.

Builtwith has sort of been the industry standard for providing data about websites and their technologies. The Australian company has been around since 2007 according to Crunchbase. They consistently crawl the web to see which companies and websites use specific technologies. For example, you might want to know which companies use Marketo or Hubspot.

Recently, Datanyze launched. They focused not just on crawling the www for technologies, but crawling them every single day. This is helpful for sales people because you can find out which companies are testing out your competitors’ products and then offer your services as well. For example, let’s say you are a lesser known marketing automation SaaS like LoopFuse. Wouldn’t it be interesting for you to see which companies are testing out the Marketo solution?

Today, Builtwith launched their version of this solution with the featured called “Builtwith Alerts” – You can see more information . We recently added a new feature to our Enterprise solution that allows users to select specific technologies when creating/exporting our company and people lists. So you not only get to find out which websites are using what, but you also get to download specific executives.

One of the most requested data sets customers ask for is information on which technologies a company uses. For example, many customers want to build a list of companies or employees that use Marketo, Salesforce or MailChimp. Because we are planning to test out pricing models we have decided to offer this as a free add-on to our Enterprise solution.

Those of you who already have Enterprise now receive this feature. For those that don’t, you are able to upgrade to enterprise with our normal pricing($1999) for the time being. This is just an introductory offer as we don’t know what the pricing will look like in the future. Not only are we are the first solution to bring together website IT Intelligence and company contacts, our pricing is currently a third of what our nearest competitor is charging… so we don’t know what the plans are in the future. Also notice that our company profiles now contain a section called “IT Intelligence” where you can “view” this information. If you would like a live demo please use our contact form.

Glam Media, Inc. recently welcomed Jill Byron as the company’s new SVP Marketing. She was most recently with CBS Interactive, where she served as their VP of Marketing. Byron will share with the team her experience of over two decades in marketing. There’s more about her appointment on this news link.

Lumber Liquidators recently promoted James Davis to the position of Senior Vice President, Sales. He was previously their Vice President of Sales for the Eastern division of the U.S. Davis became part of the company back in 2009. There’s more about his appointment on this news link.

Roger Egan was recently named as the new senior vice president of sales and channels for Docker, Inc. He was most previously part of Red Hat, where he was VP of North America channels alliance and commercial/SMB sales. Egan will share more than two decades of experience in sales work in the hardware, software, and services industries. There’s more about his appointment on this news link.

Bill Gerski was recently named Vice President of Sales for Huawei Technologies USA. He had worked with companies like Time Warner, Bell Atlantic, and Viacom. Gerski will share with the team four decades of experience in the field. There’s more about his appointment on this news link.

Peoplefluent® recently appointed Chauncey Kupferschmid as their new SVP of Sales and Business Development. He was most recently with Silkroad, where he was Chief Sales Officer. Kupferschmid will contribute to the team his experience in software sales leadership, spanning over 25 years. There’s more about his appointment on this news link.

Sheetz Inc. recently appointed David Woodley as the company’s new executive vice president of sales and marketing. He became part of the company back in 1983. Woodley has worked on brands like MTO®, Sheetz Bros. Coffeez®, MTGo! and Shweetz. There’s more about his appointment on this news link.